This Sunday, Ascension Sunday, is the last Sunday of the Easter Season. Over the 50 or so days of Easter it’s easier than not for worship to be joyful and vibrant and passionately declarative where ‘He is Risen’ trumpets over and above the normal human-made gobble-de-gook that can paralyze the kingdom. With our hearts full and our hands outstretched in praise, Jesus does something extraordinary . . . he leaves.
Jesus is taken up to the heavens and the disciples are left there slack-jawed with craned neck as if they are waiting to taste the rainbow of Skittles from the sky. Jesus can’t leave! There’s too much to talk about. What are we supposed to think about the internet or genetics or plutonium or football or Harry Potter or . . .
Or Mars? How would Christianity work on Mars? Would those on a Martian colony scoff at Jesus’ “Consider the birds of the air?” Maybe, instead of Christmas and Easter, most casual martian worshipers would go to church on Ascension Sunday because it was the day that Jesus said “no!” to earthly gravity. Would the church split into “The United Terrestrial Church” and “The Red Planet Community?” This may be a silly example, but it points to truth. How much of The Gospel do we culturally take for granted? I mean, eating crawfish is an abomination (Leviticus 11), but try telling that to a Cajun!
In Christianity Rediscovered Vincent J. Donovan reflects on sharing the Gospel with the Masai tribe of Tanzania saying:
“It is surely here in the midst of the cultures of the world, and not in the church, that the ordinary way of salvation must lie, the ordinary means of salvation, the very possibility of salvation for most of the human race. Or else it is a very strange God we have. The gospel must be brought to the nations in which already resides the possibility of salvation . . . An evangelist, a missionary must respect the culture of a people, not destroy it. The incarnation of the gospel, the flesh and blood which must grow on the gospel is up to the people of a culture”
With Jesus ascended the disciples, guided by The Holy Spirit, had to think for themselves, and we are still called to live according to a Christ-centered, Spirit-inspired, God-affirmed discernment today. The Bible doesn’t tell you what to do on a Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 pm. It is our job to use the habits of the church (prayer, fasting, works of piety and justice, holy communion, devotion) to inform our daily walk on The Way. With Christ sitting at the Lord’s right hand both the task, difficulty, and blessings are greater.
When we think of church controversy, it would be helpful to place the content of division and strife in a completely different context . . . say on Mars, to see what’s truly essential and what might just be emotional fodder or intellectual bias or just plain superfluous. Or maybe Mars is too far. How does your neighbor understand the Gospel?